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Subject: [ABERCROMBIE] New book out in Feb on ABERCROMBIE descendant SALLY(PAINE) PIERONE
Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:14:28 EST

_http://www.sallythebook.com/index.php?page_id=279_
(http://www.sallythebook.com/index.php?page_id=279)

>From same website: SALLY is the granddaugher of COL. WILLIAM RALPH
ABERCROMBIE
(son of BRIG. GEN. JOHN JOSEPH ABERCROMBIE, JR.)

_www.sallythebook.com/index.php?page_id=309_
(http://www.sallythebook.com/index.php?page_id=309) - 22k

By the book's author: JUDY LADDON

The Disgrace of Col. Abercrombie
In my research, Sally's grandfather William Ralph Abercrombie, known as
"Puppy" in the family, came across my radar as a colorful character of historical
significance to the Pacific Northwest. His life also deeply impacted his
daughter Clara, Sally's mother. Here's an abstract of his career that I gleaned from
interviews with Sally and a couple dozen old newspaper clips I found in her
family albums. --JL


N>

As a teenager Sally’s mother, Clara Abercrombie Paine, assumed a difficult
mission — to recoup the honor of her family.

Clara’s father, William Ralph Abercrombie, came from a long line of military
men — nine generations of generals. One ancestor, John Abercrombie, was a
famous English general. After the Abercrombies sided with the Revolutionaries,
another ancestor served under George Washington. The future first President of
our young nation showed his appreciation to this particular Abercrombie with a
handsome velvet-lined wooden bowl, in which are nestled two small silver cups,
a memento still treasured by present-day family members.

Ralph, as he was known, was one of thirteen children and grew up in a huge
house on a prosperous avenue in Philadelphia. Perhaps all those generations of
military medals weighed too heavily on the boy. Whatever his reason, in 1874
fifteen-year-old Ralph ran off to sea, signing up as a cabin boy on a ship
headed to foreign ports. It was an inauspicious beginning for what his family
assumed would be another distinguished military career. Rebellious by nature, Ralph
didn’t even bother to write a letter home informing his parents of his
whereabouts.

So when he suddenly reappeared after four years at sea, announcing, “Now I’m
ready to be in the army,” there was a slight problem. A person would need
some kind of powerful advocate to be accepted into West Point at the advanced age
of nineteen. Fortunately, Ralph’s older sister Sally (our Sally’s great
aunt) saved the day by writing to her friend. Ralph has returned to the family
fold, she wrote, and he wants to attend West Point. Can you help?
Her friend was President Ulysses S. Grant. The Commander-in-Chief responded
favorably, something along the lines of, “Ralph doesn’t have a proper
education, so we couldn’t send him to the Point, but I will give him a lieutenant’s
commission. We’ll send him out West. He’ll be killed, and no one will be
disgraced.”

What luck!

In 1877, the second lieutenant was the first soldier to enter Spokane, a
settlement of about three shacks. His commander, General Wheaton, had given Ralph
permission to ride ahead of the regiment in order to do some fishing. A
handsome but haggard white man called out to the soldier.

“Are you alone?” he asked. His name was James Glover. For a week the local
Indians had been dancing and drumming and showing signs of increasing hostility
toward the white settlers. Glover hadn’t been able to sleep, and he worried
this particular day he was worried he might never see the sun rise again.

“No,” answered Ralph, explaining that in two days another 700 soldiers of
the Second Infantry would arrive.

Glover was overjoyed.

Instead of being killed in the Indian wars, Ralph survived. In that Ralph
lacked the respect for authority he would have gained from West Point, however,
his military career progressed in fits and starts. Overall, he was earning the
approval of his superiors. He happily lived in tents, fished, built army forts
in the Northwest. When he returned home to Philadelphia on furlough one time,
he was captivated by Lillian Kimball, belle of the regiment, evolved from
another long line of generals. Despite mismatched ages — he was near thirty and
she was sixteen — they married. Their daughter Francis arrived, and a few years
later another girl, Clara De Normandy Abercrombie.

In 1898, when Clara was just two years old, the family was forced to prepare
for the deprivations of Ralph’s new marching orders. The war department was
sending him into the wilds of Alaska. The older child, they reasoned, could
survive a primitive lifestyle, but it was deemed too harsh for little Clara, who
was left in the care of the nuns of the Madams of the Sacred Heart Convent in
New York. It must have seemed to the child a terrible abandonment.

Her family would not return soon.

With a natural feel for engineering problems, Ralph was perfectly suited to
his new assignment, commanding an expedition to build the “trans-Alaska
military road” from the port of Valdez to the Copper River Valley in the Yukon. In
two previous seasons he had already ventured into Prince William Sound, seeking
a route into the mineral-rich Yukon territory that didn’t involve traversing
foreign (British or Russian) land.

The need for such a route became urgent in 1897 when three to four thousand
fortune-seekers poured into the region seeking gold, spurred on by misleading
ads of transportation companies. An estimated one hundred men died and scores
suffered scurvy, frostbite, snow-blindness and frustrated hopes when gold was
not readily found. When the U.S. government tried to send help across Canadian
territory, one newspaper reported, “United States troops were not permitted to
pass either as an organization or with arms. As a result of that situation
the Secretary of War was directed to have an exploration made with a view to
establishing the all-American route.”

In April 1898, Ralph Abercrombie left Seattle “with an outfit of 157 Norway
reindeer with sleds, equipment, supplies and 113 Laplanders as drivers and
herders.” This became known as the Reindeer Train, and the unusual creatures
pulled sleds until the snow was gone, and then Ralph was forced to return for pack
animals. Horses were found to be the most efficient. While briefly in Seattle
on this errand, he complained to a reporter that he regretting missing the
action of the Spanish-American war. “I tell you,” he said, “it’s hard luck to
be stationed up in Alaska when all this war is going on. My regiment is now
down in Mobile, and is likely to go to Cuba anytime, while I have nothing in
sight but a winter of hard work in the interior of Alaska. Not a single line of
fighting in prospect, unless the Swedes and the Indians start a war.”

But with his horses in tow, the captain headed for Valdez, where he found the
stranded miners “in a most pitiable condition, crowded in miserable huts like
sardines in a box.” As later reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “
There were no facilities for bathing; most of the sufferers had scurvy, and not
a few frostbitten hands, faces and feet. The tops of old rubber boots and
strips of gunnysacks made shoes and socks for many of them. The stench was
intolerable, and 70 percent of the inmates of the huts were mentally deranged.”

Captain Abercrombie, with the blessing of the war department, promptly hired
upwards of 300 men, whom he fattened up and employed in starting work on a
four-foot wide trail along an estimated 385-mile route to the Copper River Valley.

Lillian and little Francis, as well as the chief engineer’s wife, remained in
Valdez while the men threw themselves into their hazardous assignment.
Several times Ralph’s life was in danger. In September 1899, when they were eighty
miles into the interior of Alaska, Ralph and his men experienced major
earthquakes.

“Both shocks came on Sunday,” Ralph later told a reporter, “just a week
apart. It was a terrific trembling. We were in a cottonwood grove. Some of the men
were badly scared, particularly when the dead trees began to topple over.
Great rocks came tumbling down the hillsides, really endangering life. But the
grandest sight was that of Mount Wrangel in eruption. We were 150 miles from the
lofty peak, yet we could distinctly see her belching forth great volumes of
dense black smoke. No doubt she spit fire, too, but the flames we could not
see. The smoke was densest and blackest just after the shocks. It was a thrilling
scene I assure you.”

The earthquakes caused the Miles glacier to release a mile-long chunk. This
created another peril. “We found the icy straits full of submerged ice,”
recounted the captain, “and our expedition boat, the Dora, was caught in a floe one
night and had a hole smashed in her bow. We signaled by rockets and
torchlights, and the Indians built fires ashore, which served as beacons and enabled us
to reach shore and beach her. The Indians helped us put in a plug, and then
we proceeded down to Juneau…”

Another time, when Ralph was fording a glacial stream on horseback, “officer
and beast were turned over and over in it, and could not make the passage…”

Stock were killed by snow slides, officers were stricken snowblind, six feet
of snow fell once in five days.

Incessant rain and fog stalled the group at the approach to the Valdez
glacier at Bates Pass in July, when Ralph experienced the most desolate night of his
twenty-two-years’ service at the Western frontier. “The humidity was so
pronounced,” Ralph wrote in a report, “and so continuous that bacon and ham
became one mass of mold; the water of crystallization in the sugar being liberated,
the sugar wasted away in the form of syrup…”

Horses and men were roped together, twelve miles onto the glacier, as they
were pummeled by rain. “The night was black, the rain continuous, and
occasionally the mighty glacier would crack as it settled in its passage to the valley
below, with a vibration that would cause the men to stop in the tramp, and the
horses to quiver with apprehension; then would follow a deafening crash as
some thousands of tons of ice detached from one of the hundreds of glaciers that
fringe the mountainside would come crashing down on to the main glacier, and
bounding from wall to wall of the canyon, the echo would die out down the
valley many thousand feet below.”

The journey across the glacier, at a time of year when it was considered
impassable, was completed in twenty-nine hours, “without sleep or shelter.”

Hardships notwithstanding, Ralph came to know Alaska like the back of his
hand, and for some years he was the only one who extolled the mineral and
agricultural possibilities of the Copper River Valley. He praised the black soil that
went down to a depth of four to six feet. “Native grasses, berries and
flowers are found in great quantities,” he wrote in his government report, “and of
a most luxuriant growth. Some of the finest currants I have ever seen grow in
the greatest profusion.”

Farmers would find fertile land, he insisted, and miners could harvest gold,
copper, silver, cinnabar, galena, quartz, iron, coal, lignite and marble.

Ralph’s efforts paid off. The government responded, the road was built, and
2,600 miles of telegraph line were laid down. The captain was chosen to guide
Teddy Roosevelt when the 26th President ventured into the Northwest wilderness
to hunt bear.

Still, the officer was more independently minded and less tractable than was
good for a military man. Hints of this are found in the news clips. One copper
mine owner was quoted as saying, “The talk that is being indulged in against
Captain Abercrombie, I should judge, is the result of some differences. Some
time ago he had a disagreement with the whaling company. What it was over I am
not informed, but he has done wonderful work, no matter what anyone says.”

Another news account referred to a heated conflict between Ralph and an
Alaskan post office official. Ralph wrote to government authorities criticizing the
fellow, who was called to Washington D.C. “from his distant station,” where
he denied the accusations.

The Postmaster General asked Ralph for more information, and his refusal to
provide such caused a stir. “He was informed that his position in the matter
was unworthy an officer of his reputation and rank, and that his conduct was far
from commendable.”

Although this tempest blew over, no one could say that Ralph wasn’t warned of
the scandal that would follow some years later.

It was two years before Ralph and Lillian returned to New York to collect
their daughter Clara, who had lived from age two to four with the nuns of the
Madams of the Sacred Heart Convent.

Ralph advanced in rank to colonel and commanded such promising young Army
officers as George C. Marshall and Omar Bradley before moving to Spokane in 1910
and becoming commander of Fort George Wright.

At one point he was punished by being assigned a battalion of black soldiers.
These men displayed such professionalism and effectiveness in aiding Spokane
police during an I.W.W. labor strike that the city council issued an official
resolution expressing its gratitude. Ralph encouraged his men to form an
enviable, crack baseball team that whipped all the whites.

One summer, while Clara at age seventeen was touring Europe with her
well-to-do classmates, her father’s good fortune was arrested. Labor strikers from
town approached the commander for help. Ralph sympathized with the workers and
offered them food and supplies. City officials and business owners were
scandalized.

“Don’t help the strikers!” they told him.

“I’ll help them if I want to,” responded the colonel.

Not surprisingly, the conflict did not end with angry words alone.

The War Department in Washington D.C. was notified by irate city officials. “
Your colonel out here is interfering with Spokane.”

Col. Abercrombie received an order: “You must apologize to Spokane and stop
helping these people. It’s none of your business.”

Ralph, the career military man, responded unequivocally. “I’ll be goddamned
if I will.”

By the time Clara returned from Europe, her father had been relieved of his
command, booted from the Army, and her parents suffered the indignity of being
forced to move to a small house on Spokane’s South Hill.
The family was utterly disgraced.
===================================================
Jacqueline Sleeper Russell
Website:_
http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=SRCH&db=jacquelinesr&surname=A_
(http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=SRCH&db=jacquelinesr&surname=A)



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